One of my posts from April, “Sexism and Misogyny in Geek Culture,” saw some really long and detailed comments a few weeks back. (If it’s a topic that interests you, I encourage you to go check it out.) I had to step away from blogging for a while to focus my work efforts elsewhere—and I’ll probably have to step away for another few weeks as I prepare to move from Philadelphia to Boston—but for now, I wanted to pull out one particular tangent that developed in the course of that aforementioned discussion. Specifically, I had brought up the long-standing hostility and resentment toward male athletes among geeks, implying at the time that it might be comparable to the negative attitudes exhibited by some geeks toward women.
In that discussion, Jordan commented that he doesn’t see geeks harassing jocks online as much as he sees them harassing women, and Aenna noted that geeks’ harassment of jocks seems to be mostly in the form of weak, homophobic insults. I’ve actually noticed much more pervasive, vitriolic, and even creatively involved responses, though. I wanted to make note of a couple examples and invite others to chime in with their own thoughts on the matter as well. I sat on this post for several days as I worked on other things, but now, with the release of Joss Whedon’s geeky supervillain musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, it seemed like a particularly timely issue.
Geek Studies 